As a place-based school we are always looking for ways to lead our students in local explorations. But by the time they reach middle school, students are ready to further investigate how local issues connect to the bigger picture.

Despite the rain (and snow!), fieldwork continues at Southwest Charter. Forays into the community are augmented with classroom visits from local experts and other knowledgeable neighbors. Here is the breakdown of project work and related fieldwork for this winter:

Ready or not, the rainy season has started. Water is trickling down streets, tumbling down creeks, and rushing into the Willamette. At the same time, Salmon are struggling to make it back home. This fall, our 4th and 5th graders are studying the path water takes from the...Read More »

The Southwest Charter School board will meet in Special Executive Session pursuant to ORS 192.660 Section 2(i) to review and evaluate the employment‐related performance of the chief executive...Read More »

To gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for the work of our school please take this opportunity to look over Southwest Charter School’s Fieldwork and Place-based Coordinator Sarah Anderson’s 2015/2016 Annual Report.

Here are fieldwork highlights from around our school this spring trimester:

Kindergartens made several visits to Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge to explore, play and learn lots of important facts about wetlands, frogs and the life cycle. They presented their learnings in a wetland museum in their...Read More »

The 4th and 5th graders of Southwest Charter School have worked hard to create a unique guide to downtown Portland, dubbed the Downtown Portland Geology Quest. This self-guided tour of fourteen downtown Portland buildings is intended to teach curious folks of all ages about the kinds of rock our city’s...Read More »

A group of 7th and 8th graders and Fieldwork Coordinator, Sarah Anderson, are interviewed by Jim Ferretti. Students talk about their current Project Citizen project, the unique process they go through in the classroom, and the overall success of the program in our school.

You may think that winter is not a great time to be outdoors in Portland, but don’t tell that to our kids! As part of our adopt-a-place program, our kindergarteners, 1st, 2nd, 6th, 7th and 8th graders have all braved the rain and mud while improving their partner parks in...Read More »

Ancient squid and starfish fossils. Roots of a 1.8 billion year-old, compressed Minnesota mountain. Rocks from France, Germany, India, Italy, California, and Indiana. The same marble that Michelangelo used to carve David. Where can you find all of these geologic treasures? As our 4th and 5th graders...Read More »

This spring, many of our students completely immersed themselves in our local history and environment!

Our third and fourth grades spent the spring trimester studying Portland history, with a special focus on bridges. Both classes went on a walking tour of downtown and toured our bridges from the unique perspective of...Read More »

SW Charter students got a special opportunity to be some of the very first Max passengers across the new Tilikum Crossing Bridge. The Bridge, which formally opens in September, is built specifically for mass transit, bike and pedestrian use and will...Read More »

In Spring 2015, Know Your City partnered with SW Charter School to offer a comics workshop that supported their term-long study of the history of civil rights movement and local African American history. During the course of several weeks teachers Lisa Colombo and Karinsa Kelly led the students in discussions and...Read More »

Immigration is a hot topic. For middle school students tuning into recent news, there are lots of questions: Why is there so much debate about immigration? How did we get to our current legal position on immigration? What are the different perspectives and who has them?

Some of you may have heard that the Portland City Council voted on Wednesday (February 18) to ban smoking in all City of Portland Parks. The ban, proposed by Commissioner Amanda Fritz, passed on a 4-1 vote. A group of our 8th graders who had worked on this ban for their Project Citizen...Read More »

What are elements of a mountain? What lives on a mountain? How do weather and people effect mountains? How are mountains created? These are just some of the questions our 1st and 2nd graders are exploring this winter. As part of this trimester-long unit, students trekked to the...Read More »

We are pleased to announce that SWCS has been awarded a grant of $2,600 for 2015 from the Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC)! The grant will fund a project that partners our 5/6 classes with the National College of Natural Medicine (NCNM) and local multi-disciplinary artist, Nina Montenegro. The NCNM has...Read More »

During this fall, seventh and eighth grade students embarked on a big job.

Their task?

To catalog as many trees in the South Waterfront as possible. They learned how to use dichotomous keys to identify the trees, and then collected standard measurements of the trees for the City. Prior to our students’...Read More »

On a cold, clear and blustery day, Southwest Charter School K-7 students got a special sneak-peek tour at the new South Waterfront Greenway. This is the new park that has been built between the condo towers and the Willamette River just a few minutes from our school. JW Fowler...Read More »

5/6 teacher Lisa Colombo sees things differently now that she has taught an intensive animal tracking class. “At first, the forest just looks like a forest, but when you look closer, you see MILLION little things!” This was among the many observations she shared after returning with...Read More »

Note from Anne Gurnee, Education Director: Your amazing support at last year’s auction helped make a new position possible at Southwest Charter School, the Field Work Coordinator. We were fortunate to hire our own, Sarah Anderson (former 7/8 Humanities teacher) to fill the position. And she has been busy! She...Read More »